Bliss & Emptyness ~ A Buddhist Approach to Identity

Bliss & Emptiness – A Buddhist Approach to Identity

Day/Session:Thursday 1H

Convener:Heather Vescent

Notes-taker(s): Romain Lenglet

Tags for the session – Technology discussed/ideas considered:

Buddhism, Philosophy, Ego

Discussion notes, key understandings, outstanding questions, observations, and, if appropriate to this discussion: action items, next steps:

• How to deal with the large amount of drama and conflict in the world?
  • Reduce the sources of drama (people, etc.)
  • Heather interprets Buddhism as promoting emptiness
• Our identity changes over time, constantly
  • There is no consistent identity
  • We're becoming someone else, all the time
• In standards, we're not caring who you really are
• The question is: how can we help users be in a blissful state?
• The ego is an illusion
• But we are social animals
  • We need to interact and function in the world
  • So we adopt personas
  • This is a necessary and good thing
  • The key is to not *identity* with our personas
• One way to model this is
  • Personality -> Personas -> Roles -> ...
  • We typically each have lots of identities / personas / attributes
• One way to define our identity is in terms of our relationships
  • We are interdependent, inter-being
  • Ubuntu philosophy: I am because we are
  • "Collective identity"
  • Identity is a social and contextual construct
• The Australian definition of a person: someone who has a digital identity
  • That's a very extreme position, and it seems wrong
  • Bringing in a Buddhism point of view would help prevent going into such an extreme position
• Thai society seems to be losing its Buddhist tradition
  • They seem to be moving to Western culture
  • But there shouldn't be an opposition between Buddhist and Westerm cultures
• The risk of technology is that we may be trapped in hive minds / group think / echo chambers
  • We're driven by a need to belong, to be in a group
• Mindfulness is about being intentional in how we use our identity / personas
  • We are responsible for our own identities / personas
• Frustration with SSI
  • It's hard to manage the nuances of those many identities / personas
  • Technology should allow us to better manage our personas, and managing more personas
  • For instance, it could give us some insights / awareness about our own identity
  • Technology should help us with that, but it currently doesn't and may even prevent us
• Technology needs to better address the temporal aspect of identity
  • Better match our constant changes of identities over time
  • Concept of "identity flow"
• However, the overall conclusion is that technology has limits in how it solved identity
• We need better terms
  • Identity is too vague, and is used to refer to too many different things
  • Better terms would be: persona, identifier, ego, etc.
• No spider was harmed during this session